Boost-Inspired Dness

September 25th, 2006 | by Aldacron |

A fellow by the name of Lutger has knocked up a signal-slots library. From the website:

To summarize, signals are used to store multiple callbacks and invoke them in one call. This library uses a templated design with optionally managed connections, inspired by boost::signals. The documentation contains plenty of examples and explanation.

You’ll notice that Lutger’s work was inspired by boost::signals. In other D-Boost news, Marcin Kuszczak has ported boost::any to D. You can get the files from the newsgroup post that announced it.

I’ve never been on the Boost bandwagon myself and just don’t see what warrants all of the hype the library gets. But apparently a great many people find it useful. I’m sure we’ll be seeing many more Boost ports and Boost-inspired interfaces in the future.

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4 Responses to “Boost-Inspired Dness”

  1. By Justin Calvarese on Sep 25, 2006

    I think this is the relevant newsgroup post: digitalmars.D.announce:4827.

  2. By Aldacron on Sep 25, 2006

    Thanks, Justin.

  3. By Pragma on Sep 28, 2006

    “I’ve never been on the Boost bandwagon myself and just don’t see what warrants all of the hype the library gets.”

    While I was never a big C++ guy myself, I always felt that Boost has a lot going for it. So call me “on the bandwagon if you will.” :)

    Boost extends C++’s capabilities, and allows the developer to do things that were only really possible in other langauges. It also elevates template programming to a level well beyond where STL takes it - well, at least on compilers that support templates correctly.

    Plus, it’s so big that it almost makes the native capability set of c++ look as rudimentary as an assembler by comparison:
    http://www.boost.org/libs/libraries.htm

    In a nutshell, it did for C++ what prototype.js did for webapps.

    Personally, I find Boost to be very inspirational. The Spirit parser lib, for example, practically begot Enki (in my mind, anyway) after I found that D doesn’t have as many operator overloads as C++ (so I couldn’t just port spirit directly).

    Anyway, enough of my rambling. I think you’re right that we’ll see more Boost ports to D in the future. Some parts of that library are simply too useful to be left out.

  4. By Aldacron on Sep 28, 2006

    My biggest gripe with Boost is just that *everything* is templated. I think templates are something that should be used in moderation. For a language designed around them, my attitude might be different. But C++ is not such a language. Templatizing everything just to bolt on generic functionality not implemented by the language seems to me to be unnecessary bloat. I’m sure some of it is quite useful. I just think people put too much stock in it and are barking up the wrong tree. Too much of a good thing is still too much.

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